The effects of human social contact on the electrocardiogram (EKG) and general behavior of 2 horses were explored. Petting elicited a slowing of heart rate, while a person entering and exiting elicited transient, but often marked heart rate increases. In both horses transient periods of T wave inversion occurred in the EKG during human contact. In one of the horses the frequency of dropped heart beats increased dramatically during successive trials of human petting. In this horse a total of 29 dropped heart beats were observed of which 23 occurred while a person was with the horse, although this contact occupied only 15 percent of the total observation period.
These findings parallel previous observations made with dogs. Similar observations of changes in the heart rate and rhythm of patients in coronary care units and a shock‐trauma unit during social contact with other humans underscore the need to develop empirical analogues of these reactions. The horse appears to offer an ideal model for understanding the psychosocial, hemodynamic, and central nervous system mechanisms involved in these reactions.
The taxation of financial services used by households has been a stumbling block in designing consumption taxes. We present a theoretical case for exempting from tax investment services, loan services, and insurance services. These services are not consumption items. Instead, they represent the cost of smoothing consumption across time, as in the case of investment or loan services, and across states of nature, as in the case of insurance services. Since these services provide the funds used to purchase fully taxable consumption goods, these services should be expensed just as the cost of physical investment goods should be expensed.
Gravelle (1989) argues that the 1986 Act reduced (but did not eliminate) the corporate/noncorporate distortion. 3 More formally, the cost of capital is the return that equates the discounted present value of the investment's expected cash flow with the investment's cost, i.e., it is the pre-tax internal rate of return. It is the return on the last dollar invested in equilibrium because the investor will continue to undertake projects as long as the present value of the projects' cash flows exceed their cost. 4 Economic depreciation is the rate at which the value of an asset falls as the asset ages (Hulten and Wykoff, 1996; Fraumeni, 1997). 5 Economic income is a measure of a taxpayer's real economic well-being over some time period, typically taken to be one year. It is the taxpayer's consumption plus changes in his wealth. See Goode (1977). 6 The present value of depreciation at rate δ is ∫δe-δt e-(r-π)t dt, where the flow is discounted by a real rate to reflect indexing. Integrating gives the expression in the text. 7 A positive ITC also lowers the effective tax rate below the statutory tax rate.
In part because of concerns that the tax depreciation system may be dated and may not properly measure income, Congress directed that the Treasury study the current tax depreciation system. This paper is derived from the staff work for the Treasury Study. The paper first discusses the rationale for a depreciation allowance. It next describes the current tax depreciation system. Using the cost of capital, the paper evaluates the current tax depreciation system. It then discusses several comprehensive reforms of the tax depreciation system, and calculates the effects of these reforms on the cost of capital. The final section discusses several practical problems with the current tax depreciation system.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.